A storage system is a computer that provides storage service relating to the organization of information on writable persistent storage devices, such as memories, tapes or disks. The storage system is commonly deployed within a storage area network (SAN) or a network attached storage (NAS) environment. When used within a NAS environment, the storage system may be embodied as a file server including an operating system that implements a file system to logically organize the information as a hierarchical structure of data containers, such as files on, e.g., the disks. Each “on-disk” file may be implemented as a set of data structures, e.g., disk blocks, configured to store information, such as the actual data (i.e., file data) for the file.
Herein the term “client” and “host” are used interchangeably.
Where the information is organized as files, the client requesting the information, typically maintains file mappings and manages file semantics, while its requests (and storage system responses) address the information in terms of block addressing on disk using, e.g., a logical unit number (lun).
A network environment may be provided wherein information (data) is stored in secure storage served by one or more storage systems coupled to one or more security appliances. Each security appliance is configured to transform unencrypted data (cleartext) generated by clients (or initiators) into encrypted data (ciphertext) destined for secure storage or “cryptainers” on the storage system (or target). As used herein, a cryptainer is a piece of storage on a storage device, such as a disk, in which the encrypted data is stored. In the context of a SAN environment, a cryptainer can be, e.g., a disk, a region on the disk or several regions on one or more disks that, in the context of a SAN protocol, is accessible as a lun (logical unit number).
Each cryptainer is associated with its own encryption key, e.g., a cryptainer key, which is used by the security appliance to encrypt and decrypt the data stored on the cryptainer. An encryption key is a code or number which, when taken together with an encryption algorithm, defines a unique transformation used to encrypt or decrypt data. Data remains encrypted while stored in a cryptainer until requested by an authorized client. At that time, the security appliance retrieves the encrypted data from the cryptainer, decrypts it and forwards the unencrypted data to the client.
In practical systems encrypted data stored on a disk block (or other cryptainer) is often re-keyed, that is re-encrypted, according to a policy. If for example, the policy may dictate that, if an encryption key is compromised, the data may not be secure and must be re-keyed or re-encrypted. The policy may also dictate that, as a matter of common practice, data might be regularly re-encrypted on a time basis. For example, for critical information the data may be re-encrypted every day or week or month, whereas other data may be re-encrypted over longer time periods, e.g., every year. Herein re-keying involves reading and decrypting ciphertext data with the old key to yield clear data, and then re-encrypting the clear data with a new encryption key and restoring the data to the storage medium.
In some systems the security appliance performs the encryption and decryption, and, in addition, the security appliance may control access to both the storage and the client or authentication, where only “secure known” clients are served. The security appliance is the proxy for both the client and the storage system. That is the security appliance appears as the storage system to the client and appears as the client to the storage system. Additionally, re-keying is also handled by the security appliance, where the security appliance manages the key(s) and the block(s) associated with each key. In known systems each file may be encrypted with a given key and the file and the key are stored and tracked by the security appliance using a file system to manage all the file keys.
The security appliance logs and tracks the activities for a large number of differs ent clients, a large number of different file blocks, a large number of different encryption keys that must be generated and implemented, and a large number of different storage systems. The security appliance store the policy governing such re-keying while tracking a very large number of new keys and corresponding very large number of blocks being re-keyed. The security appliance interacts with the storage system to reserve space and to initiate reads and writes to that space, and it ensures that there is no interference among the clients, files, keys, and storage systems.
The volume of tasks enumerated above may affect system performance. The operations may be slowed and become more inflexible due to the work load. Accordingly, it may be advantageous to offload or shift some of the tasks performed by the security appliance to improve performance.